5/03/2014

My father died when I started university, and I didn't tell anyone

My father died when I was 18. It still feels very strange to write that, much less say it out loud. One afternoon halfway through my first week at university he suffered a bowel infarction, and died almost instantly.

My dad was not the picture of healthy living – he was a chain smoker and a heavy drinker. But you still do not expect a parent to drop down dead with no warning three days after you leave home.

I cannot remember much of the fortnight following his death except a blur of family, funeral, and being found by the night porter completely hysterical and key-less at half one. Don't brave Oxford night clubs when newly bereaved.

Grief is such a damaging thing. It is so pervasive that it silently touches every aspect of life without you quite realising. Over the months following my father's death I quietly imploded without myself or anyone around me at university noticing.

I had gone from a tight-knit friendship group of people I had known for years to an environment where I knew barely anyone. Despite support from my family and my friends, I slipped into a desperate black hole of apathy that I refused to acknowledge.

I told barely anyone at my college about my father's death for fear of being labelled "that girl whose father died". I never cried except when completely wasted or on the phone to my mum the night before an essay deadline.

Somehow it never occurred to me that the reason I couldn't achieve anything and felt so awful all the time might be connected to the fact that I had just lost my father. As deadlines whooshed by, all I could feel was that I was inadequate and incapable of university life.

Whenever my peers went out clubbing and I couldn't think of anything worse I assumed it was because I was terrible at making new friends. It never occurred to me to give myself time to deal with my loss or seek some counselling. I thought my inability to function like a normal person was down to my own failures, and nothing to do with grief.

In the depths of depression there are always windows of cheer. I made some wonderful friends in my first year, who were shocked when I eventually told them that my dad had died on the evening of our freshers' toga party.

But so often, it's that brief respite from veiled misery that makes it all the more painful when you're alone in your room at 5am on deadline day, cursing your incompetence and wishing you had never left home. These are moments of fear and inadequacy that every first year student has, compounded by the omnipresence of loss.

At some point, I did begin to comprehend what I'd been through and how it had affected me.

Have you ever completed a piece of work and suddenly realised the impact that its spectre had been having on your mood? Or finally had that conversation you'd been dreading and can directly connect how down you've been feeling to the weight of it hanging over you?

How depressed I'd been wasn't obvious until the worst of it was over. It is only after you come out of the other side of a tunnel into the daylight that you realise quite how dark and hopeless it had been before.

I don't think I really got back to my normal self until the beginning of last year, around two years after my father died. I can pinpoint the moment that I realised quite how awful it had all been, and began to regain the optimism and joie de vivre that I hadn't even realised I had lost.

Walking around New York with some of my favourite people I suddenly remembered how much fun I could allow myself to have. A block was lifted from my vision and the future suddenly didn't stretch out so bleakly.

I made the decision to take a year out and I made plans for the following term. My life was taken off pause and began again.

On the night my dad died I asked my mum like a small child who has fallen over how it could hurt so much and when the pain would go away - because that's what the first moments of real loss are, pain that is so unbearable it is almost physical.

She told me that I was sad, and that I would always be sad, but that over time it would become easier to face that sadness and accept it.

I'm not sure that anyone every really "gets over" the sudden loss of a loved one, yet grief is as cleansing as it is destructive. As dreadful as it was living through it, grief is the purest and most untainted emotion I have ever felt.

I can now say out loud that my father died when I was 18, and that I am sad, but that when I came out of that tunnel of grief and loss the light on the other side felt much more valuable than it did before.